Special Olympics and the Burden of Happiness

When Special Olympics athletes get their medals — and the competitions are designed so that many, many do — the music swells, they pump their fists and their parents and teammates clap and yell. At the 2015 Special Olympics World Games across Los Angeles this week, the medals ceremonies went on for hours, a cascade of triumphant moments, one after another after another.

The glow has to last, because the athletes will need it when they get home and become invisible again.

This is the conundrum of Special Olympics, an organization so good at making its athletes and the public happy, so bursting with good will and smiles, that nobody has to take it seriously. It has waged a nearly 50-year battle for inclusion and acceptance for people with intellectual disabilities, and people still think it’s a track meet.

It’s not that the organization has given up the broader struggle, which by many measures is failing. The Special Olympics chairman, Timothy Shriver, convened a round-table discussion at the World Games to try to get world and corporate leaders, the United Nations and other organizations to commit to greater support for people with intellectual disabilities, a group perennially left out of global development programs and priorities. They are not on the world’s agenda, however much their ever-smiling advocates keep trying to put them on.

Mr. Shriver explained a perverse truth: The more the world commits to programs for poverty and education, the greater the gap for those with intellectual disabilities. That’s because money goes where results are quick and quantifiable, which is not likely for people with intellectual disabilities. The organization reports, for example, that at least 90 percent of children with disabilities in the developing world are denied the right to an education. Money for schools and health education never reaches them.

People with intellectual disabilities, an estimated 3 percent of the population, are hidden in institutions, in private homes, in segregated schools, willfully kept beyond the public’s vision. And the injustices they suffer — educational abandonment, medical neglect, sexual abuse — often go unanswered.

Mr. Shriver has a theory.

When members of minority groups make progress, he said, it is because “deep down most people know they are the same as us, as me, whoever the dominant majority is.

“But with our group it’s like, ‘No, no, no, they are not the same. They are not like us. They are not going to go to medical school if we give them a scholarship. They’re not going to become engineers,’ ” he said. “We labor under the barrier, the attitudinal barrier, that this population is too different to matter.”

Given those barriers, Special Olympics is sticking with gentle persuasion and the attitude-changing power of sports. It is all carrot, no stick. It is not ACT UP, and never will be; its revolution is televised, happily, on ESPN. This is a carefully thought-out strategy. Even its health programs — Special Olympics athletes tend to have serious untreated problems with vision, teeth and hearing — are part of what Mr. Shriver called “an elaborate bait-and-switch.” Its clinics offer much-needed care, but their deeper purpose is to educate doctors about such patients, who too oftenget short shrift and indifferent care.

Special Olympics is a utopian organization, and to encounter it is to enter a well-constructed bubble of acceptance and equality. A strange thing happens when you spend a week inside that bubble at the Special Olympics World Games, watching groups of young people wandering about, relaxed and confident. You stop noticing the differences. The novelty wears off, and it becomes clearer that the world is full of people of an astonishing variety of appearances and abilities.

But outside the bubble, the battle for hearts and minds, and for rights and laws, is not going away.